With the launch of SWIFT the eSTAR alert network should hopefully be able to go into full time operation quite soon. This means that override observations of γ-Ray Bursts will automatically be scheduled onto the available telescopes within moments on the alert being recieved ground side...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.